The market for telecoms customer care systems grew between 2008 and 2009, despite the recession. Customer care systems enable communications service providers (CSPs) to offer services, take orders and provide a full range of support, both human and automated, to their customers. Several factors drove growth in this telecoms software market:
- greater competition in the emerging markets
- the increasing complexity of services and service bundles that CSPs are offering in all markets
- consumers’ strong desire for instant service
- the increasing need of CSPs to offer many new services quickly
- the need to reduce customer support costs.
Chief among these was CSPs’ need to support new services and complex service bundles more quickly than ever before, as shown in our recently published Customer care market share report 2009.
The saturation of many mature mobile markets is driving CSPs to offer many new services in order to increase ARPU. In emerging markets, CSPs are constantly adding new services to keep pace with increasing competition. CSPs’ networks can now support new services quickly, using service delivery platforms coupled with subscriber data management systems. However, the BSS and OSS infrastructure, as well as the personnel, must be prepared to offer and support such services. The preparations used to require a special IT project and take 3–6 months – much too long.
Modern customer care and billing systems have architecture and features that reduce that time – potentially to a few days or weeks – without the need for special IT projects. Major vendors, such as Amdocs and Oracle, offer integrated billing and customer care systems that share common data, usually called product and service catalogues. They also provide specialised order orchestration systems for proposing, composing, and fulfilling the overall customer order, which often involves more than a dozen individual components. The benefit of such integrated architecture is one of the reasons why the customer care market has become so consolidated (see Figure 1).
![Figure 1: Customer care market shares by revenue, worldwide, 2009 [Source: Analysys Mason, 2010]](/PageFiles/16082/Insight_0807_Figure1.gif)
Figure 1: Customer care market shares by revenue, worldwide, 2009
[Source: Analysys Mason, 2010]
However, the customer care market still has more than 50 software suppliers that command revenue of several million dollars. Two vendors dominate the China market, Huawei and AsiaInfo, which also features many smaller, geographically or functionally focused suppliers. Many of these smaller players have entered the market with offerings that attempt to provide the benefits of the integrated, single-vendor architecture, but without requiring large transformation projects, which have recently fallen out of favour among CSPs. These department-sized transformation projects federate and augment existing customer care product and service catalogues, and add targeted, flexible CRM and order orchestration capabilities to legacy operations and systems.
These and other drivers of the customer care market are presented in Analysys Mason’s recent report, Customer care market share report 2009.